The Church as a Moral Community

Ward, Keith

doi:10.1093/oso/9780198752585.003.0012

Chapter

9 The Church as a Moral Community

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https://doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780198752585.003.0012

Pages

209–234

Published:

March 2000

Abstract

The Christian church accepts, with the other Abrahamic faiths, that God has a moral purpose for the created universe, and that human beings have the responsibility of forming a society which will enable that purpose to be realized. The Christian way is not one of individual release from bondage to the material world. It is a way of communal action to bring into actuality many of the potential sorts of value that the material world contains. There is a positive goal for creation, and that goal lies in the co-operative bringing about and enjoyment of many sorts of good things. The duty of a Christian is to co-operate with others and with the Creator in the actualization of goodness. It is to bring into being a community of justice, peace, kindness, and happiness.

Since human beings have largely created a society of injustice, war, cruelty, and misery, there is also a duty to oppose the forces that make for injustice and oppression, both in oneself and in others. Christian faith is not a way simply of inner union with God, which leaves conditions in the social world to go on in any old way. Admittedly some early Christians thought of the political world, the ‘world of the nations’, as doomed to judgment, and looked for a supernatural salvation from that judgment by the coming of Christ in glory. Even then, their hope was for a new society, a social world in which justice would flourish, even if that could only come about by supernatural intervention.’ Their concern was with justice and with the ending of injustice, even if they could see little hope of being able to do anything about it, in remote provinces of a militaristic Roman Empire.

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Contents

9 The Church as a Moral Community

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Abstract

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